Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Palin [declared] that she was "deeply concerned" and would call on the US Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, to "cease and desist" buying up government debt.

"If it doesn't work, what do we do then? Print even more money? What's the end-game here? Where will all this money printing on an unprecedented scale take us? ... All this pump-priming will come at a serious price," Palin will say, according to snippets of the speech obtained by National Review.

"Everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump-priming would push them even higher," Palin adds, putting a populist slant on monetary policy.

Her remarks place her firmly, if awkwardly, in company with an international chorus of critics opposed to a US policy that many fear is not only designed to ward off deflation but to drive down the value of the dollar and of US debt.

In reality, in all of 2009, inflation was MINUS 0.4%. Prices DEFLATED. So, last year, if you were paying "significantly" more across a broad spectrum of purchases, you were getting rooked.

And thus far in the 10 months of statistics available for 2010, inflation is running at about 1.6% on an annualized basis.

Furthermore, inflation has NOT gone above 4% per year since 1991. That's almost 20 years of very low inflation.

One can see that the Tea Partiers and their accomplices in the Republican Party are still trading on fear.

In their ignorance of all things great and small, the beastie boys and girls have yet to discover that at this moment it is DEFLATION that is the danger to the national and world economies. A bit more inflation would actually help us.

Where are the Democrats who should be calling this gang of political hoods out on this hooey?.

Monday, November 8, 2010

I'm as in favor of "cool" as the next guy. I also like a good snide remark, a nuanced response, a snippy reply. But a little controlled anger can be an excellent political tool as well.

Being the battler-in-chief presiding over a nasty, ugly sport - politics - a sort of Beyond The Thunderdome played in business suits - does not confer on the President the right to persist in rising above the messy fray obsessively, pathologically. We want a leader, not a powder puff.

Mr. Obama wears white gloves when he needs to be wearing work gloves.

Or better yet, boxing gloves.

Obama clings to cool.

One suspects at first that he is reluctant drop the smoothness because he just really, really likes his ultra cool, jazz world sang-froid. We suspect him of a form of narcissism.

Or one can ascribe it to his upbringing in Hawaii, one of the epicenters of laid back behavior. (Honk your horn aggressively there and they're ready to call the men in the white coats. Jaywalk and citizens go into convulsions - politely, of course.)

Perhaps we suspect Obama's inner coil because, in his rise to the political heap, he didn't have to scrap for decades like a Nixon, fight a world war like Ike, endure speculation about his intellectual worth like Truman, nor overcome a devastating disease like FDR. Regardless, his is a hard soul to plumb.

This is not to say that Obama hasn't had obstacles to surmount. Lord knows that becoming the first black president is an accomplishment that took enormous effort and considerable elan. Overcoming the perverse reactions to the color of one's skin, poverty, and feelings of being an outsider are nothing to sneeze at.

Which brings us to the Angry Black Man of mythology and history, for I believe it is that burden that prevents Obama from lambasting his relentless, unscrupulous attackers.

The rage of Malcom X, the glorious in-your-face attitude of Muhammed Ali, the raised fists at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City seem relics of another day.

The 1960s were an angry time - far angrier than today - when war atrocities came with your bacon and eggs, when we regularly saw dogs and hoses turned on our fellow citizens, when women were regularly put down without a whiff of ramification, when an adolescent boy could catch a beating for having long hair, when children were treated as chattel, and the leaden hangover from World War II imbued society with a relentless conformity.

It was those social norms that led to rioting, massive demonstrations, bombings, and a left-right polarization the likes of which those under 45 can scarcely fathom.

Woven throughout this rebellion was the Anger of the Black Man. It was, and is, inescapable - unless you are President Obama, who seems intent on not indulging himself in this anger, on not using it to gain noble political ends.

He is terribly, terribly wrong to avoid doing so.

The caricaturing of him as everything from a monkey to a watermelon farmer to Adolph Hitler to Stalin should have been enough.

The attacks on everything from his birthplace to his clothing to his wife and girls to his "Muslim background" should have been enough.

The mindless attacks on his relatively mild policies should have been enough.

We are reminded of the righteous anger of FDR after Pearl Harbor. We are reminded of the battle cry that partisans shouted to Truman - "Give 'em hell, Harry!" Of Reagan's battle-horn blaring - "Tear down this wall." We are reminded of JFK's first inaugural address suffused with controlled anger - "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." (A word of warning to the truculent Soviets.)

Mr. Obama: you must be willing to pay any price, bear any burden, even if it means flirting with the stereotype of the Angry Black Man.

You must find it in your belly to rise up and strike down the radical right wing harshly, filled with piss and vinegar, with blood and guts. The left, and I believe the center and perhaps even the center right, aches to hear you fight back using righteous controlled anger. We all want you to succeed.

Other presidents - all white, obviously - have loosed their anger to work for them and the country. You need to find the meaningful core of your own anger and outrage - we know it's there, you're human after all - and express it full-throated and powerfully against the enemies of progress..

Friday, November 5, 2010

For the last two years, the right wing never acknowledged that the Democrats had won a series of truly resounding victories in Congressional and Senatorial elections, a creeping tide that crested in 2008. Indeed, the right seemed to repudiate fair and square elections using terms like "ramrodding" and "oppressive majority" to describe the Democratic uber majority's enacting of historical legislation.

Now, of course, the Republicans want everyone to acknowledge their own resounding victory this past Tuesday. But face it folks, a majority of 5 in the House, given how polarized the country is, would have been as good as the bloated one handed to the right wing. Having a 20 seat majority is meaningless in terms of putting the country - and world - on a firm economic growth trajectory.

The right wing seems to have immediately forgotten that they are in the minority in the Senate and do not occupy the White House. The House still has to reckon with the Senate and the veto power of the President, should the Senate falter in fear.

Leaving aside that logistical problem, the Republicans cannot rise to the occasion because their DNA will prohibit them from doing so.

This is my hunch. Given the ideological nature of both the Republican leadership and rank and file, I believe they will not be able to address the joblessness/growth problem, because, once facts are faced, the economic philosophy that needs to be utilized is a Keynesean model and not the tired supply side economics of Milton Friedman. The Keynesean approach was used, albeit timidly, during the short "summer" when Democrats owned the whole farm. But really, where $3 trillion in stimulus was needed, less than $500 billion was tossed into the hopper.

Let's say that all the current Republican proposals that are in the wind are enacted. Let the Bush tax cuts stand as they are today. Allow the health care reform to go unfunded or underfunded. (A Constitutional crisis in the making.) Cut out all earmark spending. (It accounts for between 1 and 2% of all Federal spending.) Trim entitlements or growth of entitlements by 10%. Even trimming the sacrosanct defense budget by 10% would only account for $80 billion per year.

[A further aside on earmarks: since 2006, while Democrats have controlled Congress, earmark expenditures have fallen by 40%. That is down off the high of $29.5 billion under the Republicans of the previous Congress. Do the math. Let's say we cut out ALL of the remaining $18 billion in earmarks. Over ten years that would equal $180 billion to be put against a debt of $12 trillion or thereabouts. Keep in mind that many earmarks - while often portrayed as a part of a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - are directed to positive, necessary projects like safer drinking water systems, school construction, and rail and road improvements. Many earmarks are also part of the defense budget structure.]

It is clear that we cannot budget cut our way out of the Great Recession. This is neither ideological nor pedantic. Cutting roughly $250 billion per year from the budget would return less than the stimulus plan and it is a proven axiom that budget cuts, especially in times of recession, have about a $1.03 return on the dollar. Infrastructure spending, by contrast, returns over $1.60 on the dollar.

This is why a move like New Jersey Governor Christie's shut down of the second rail tunnel to Manhattan will prove to be so deleterious to the economy. 6,000 highly-skilled construction jobs were immediately lost. All of the service and maintenance jobs that would have been created because of the increased rail traffic are now lost. A further 70,000 jobs will not be created in all the various economic sectors in which New York and New Jersey have so long partnered: finance, tourism, retail, law, advertising. New Jersey's roads, already the most crowded in the country, will witness even more gridlock, wasted gasoline, increased pollution, and wasted time by the 45,000 commuters who would have availed themselves of the easier travel. On top of this, New Jersey will have to pay back $315 million already spent on the project.

Contrast this, as I have done before on this blog, with the building of the Erie Canal in the second and third decades of the 19th century. It was built entirely by the State of New York through public financing. In today's dollars, the canal would cost $125 billion. Christie's tunnel to nowhere would have cost about $10 billion. Just a quick reflection on that contrast reminds us of why we hold the early founders of prosperity in such high esteem. They had vision and guts.Christie has the gut part down, anyway.

We can be the world's leader in alternative energy products and generation. We can be the world's leader in high speed Internet access. We can be the world's leader in rail transportation of both goods and people. We can be the leader in clean automobiles and smart automobiles that practically drive themselves. We can be the world's leader in many, many fields, some that haven't even been imagined yet.

But, like the building of the Interstate Highway System over the past 60 years, it will take government leadership and business's willing participation.

Republicans have no plan to be the leaders of anything, except in keeping the struggling down, sending the super rich to even higher wealth accumulation levels, and ruining the American future.

While we need to acknowledge that Democrats have scarcely been better during the current crisis, we need to understand that at least the leftist, Keynesean economic model is the one that has far greater potential to take us into a better tomorrow. Plant the seeds now, reap the benefits later.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

For Democrats of every stripe, from dedicated left-wingers to Blue Dogs who cozy up on the Republican right wing lap, it is clearly time to reappraise. The awkward phase.

To understand ourselves right now we need to look at the first false steps taken after we captured the House, Senate and Presidency by comfortable margins.

Surprisingly, I do not want to speak of which legislative opportunity slipped away, which job creation program worked or did not, whether TARP was a good idea, the compromises with the greedy devils of Wall Street, or which budget would have been better or worse.

I want to talk about what George Bush (I) described as "The Vision Thing."

We, the Democrats, had no over-arching vision beyond winning the 2008 election. None. Zero. We won because we could.

Can anyone reading this, young or old, retired or just beginning his or her life or somewhere in between, envision America in 2050?

Envision it in the way the dreamers of The Declaration of Independence did for their time, Lincoln for his, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson for theirs?

Franklin Roosevelt said in his first inaugural speech, outlining the powers that had to be harnessed to end the Depression: "It is... the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer."

John F. Kennedy's visionary rhetoric is part of the national mythology. And, like his policies or not, so is the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan.

Curiously, President Obama, the candidate with the most soaring campaign rhetoric, gave us bones to pick on once he was elected.

While there is pencil-sharpening to be done, none of us should allow America to be turned into a nation of accountants, watching pennies while wondering what the hell to do with the dollars, or worse, doing nothing at all with them.

There are a half dozen urgent matters that must be resolved, everything from energy to our ill-conceived wars, from transportation to education.

Democrats did not hammer one of those problems during their brief ascendancy and we can be reasonably assured that Republicans have neither the wherewithal nor the urgency to solve them, either.

I reject the idea that health care reform was anything but a middle of the road palliative that swept structural problems under the rug.

So, what to do? What about vision?

Here is a short manifesto:

1) In order to lift up the whole nation, we have to lift up the income and security of the vast but shrinking middle class and perhaps more urgently, the upper middle class.Democrats must advance and support all efforts of unions to grow again, unions being the front line of defense against predatory practices by foreign economic interests. Unions must get to organizing white collar workers as their traditional blue collar base shrinks numerically. What the right wing has torn down, the left must build up again. Likewise, leaving aside the question of immigrants' legality and illegality, we have to stop the influx of cheap labor from undermining the aspirations of workers already in our country.

2) End the fruitless monopoly that has been given to the health care industry. It is the lack of competition that has brought us to the current pass. Legal monopoly in such a key sector is damaging to our country. If the market had been free, or almost free, we never would have gotten into the health care rhubarb in the first place. More insurance providers, more doctors, more hospitals, more primary care clinics. Stimulate and de-regulate. (The latter not something you hear often from the left.)

3) Choose a handful of regions in the country - one East or West Coast, one in the South (ideally New Orleans), and one in the upper Midwest - and make them the showcases for tomorrow's energy, environmental and transportation technologies. Not only those things that we already know, but the things that are still on the drawing board, in the imaginations of our best innovators. Make those regions something like uber World's Fairs that stretch for hundreds of miles. Call together the leaders of industries of today and tomorrow to the White House - not the money-changers but the money-makers - and get a plan together.

4) Create high speed wireless Internet connections for every single inch of the country. Just as electricity, the telephone and television have become universally accessible, the wireless Internet is a crucial key to tomorrow's economy.

5) Bring all the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan within 6 months, the consequences be damned. End the left's pointless pacifism that brings us half measures leading to the deaths of our service people. At the same time, inform any and all countries who foster terrorism in any way that they are subject to devastating attack by air or sea. We should not be losing our young (and not so young) people to the violence of mindless barbarians. We have spent trillions in technologies that lay idle as we worry about alienating countries with whom there is no diplomatic future. They are nihilists and need to be dealt with accordingly. Make the problem of terrorism their problem.

6) Cut the defense budget in half.

7) Create a new Peace Corps with our best partners - Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Chile - and in conjunction with pivotal countries in different regions - Indonesia, South Africa, Uganda, Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina - that will show the face of modernism and aspiring modernism to backward countries.

9) This may sound a tad off beat and Utopian at a time like this but - we need to reemphasize the liberal arts on all levels of education. The quantification of education has been an unmitigated disaster for the country. We have to buy out of the notion that, for instance, turning out more engineers like flapjacks is a great idea while our culture becomes debased, less literate, and more utilitarian.

Friday, October 8, 2010

If you were entertaining the cozy fireside notion that there is such a creature as a moderate Republican, slap yourself in the face and wake up. The Party of No Ideas, the Backward-Facing Party, the Anti-People and Anti-Future Party has struck again.

The decision by New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie to kill (for the moment) a new train tunnel that would allow for the doubling of rail commuters into Manhattan from 46,000 daily to 90,000 is both a tragedy and a window into the vision-less soul of the Republican Party.

Christie's pretense is that there would be unacceptable cost overruns, and that the state would have to pony up $3 billion it doesn't have. Both objections are worse than ludicrous whose real motives is supporting the gas, oil and car lobby in New Jersey.

Certainly some cost overruns - whether in the public or private spheres - are the result of corruption. The vast portion of overruns, however, are due to a) changes in engineering specs, b) unforeseen circumstances encountered during the actual build phase, and c) inflation.

Plus, a government doesn't reach into some Brobdingnagian pocket and slap $3 billion on an equally large table and ask for a receipt as if it were paying for a dinner out. It pays over multiple years. In this case, the tunnel project would be spread over a few decades, meaning it would cost the citizens of New Jersey about $20 each per year, about the cost of 7 cups of Starbucks latte.

On the drawing board for almost 20 years and recommended since 1957, the tunnel project, known as ARC (for Access to the Regional Core), has already been started and $600 million already been spent in the initial phases. The canceling of the project will cost 6,000 construction jobs within the year, most of which would have been filled by Jerseyans. It is also projected that over the course of the ten years that would have followed completion, 40,000 additional jobs will have been lost.

70,000 tons of carbon per year would have been removed from the atmosphere because 22,000 cars per day would have stayed in their garages.

The glee with which Steve Carellas, New Jersey's representative to the National Motorists Association, a group that promotes more driving and is against, among other things, DUI checkpoints and red light cameras, is illustrative of how drugged up the gas and auto lobby is. "Wow! Smart decision," Carrellas said after hearing the news. "We were upset that Port Authority and turnpike tolls went to support the tunnel. Here we have a governor doing exactly what he said he was going to do, and not being taken for a ride."

Neysa Pranger, a spokeswoman for the Regional Plan Association, said Christie’s decision "casts a dark shadow over the economic future of New Jersey." Canceling the project will effectively cost New Jersey homeowners $18 billion dollars. That’s how much home values would have increased as a result of the tunnel’s construction, according to a study by the planning association, based on the impact of three previous rail projects. The study found that the value of homes within a half mile of a rail station would have increased by $29,000, while homes within two miles would have appreciated by $19,000.

On a less dramatic note, the tunnel would have meant that the tens of thousands of people who have to stand during their 50-minute ride into the city would have had seats every morning.

But what is worse is this. Christie and his acolytes believe not in actually saving money, but putting it toward deleterious ideas - like more road building and smaller tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike and Port Authority tunnels and bridges. They will be asking that the original $3 billion federal contribution go toward replenishing the state's bankrupt Transportation Trust Fund. It is not as if they are saying, "Here, Federal Bad Government, take our $3 billion and put it toward paying down the deficit." They are saying, "Give it to us so we can keep more cars on the roads, pollution high, employment low, and retard the future, which everyone knows is going to be based on mass transit."

Why is the trust fund in the nation's most crowded and car-infested state bankrupt? The state government cannot locate the backbone to raise the gasoline tax by 1 penny per gallon. Never mind that New Jersey has the lowest gas prices ($2.63 per gallon as of today) in the northeast and is well below the national average ($2.80).

The tom-tom beats out the refrain: elections have consequences. In this case the election of one short-sighted, poorly-informed man is helping to undermine the most important economic region of the country.

Come November, we can vote for the future, as raggedy and sloppy as it may be under Democrats, or we can vote for the (lack of) right wing policies that have been tried and failed.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Once upon a time, third parties gave their associations some truly entertaining and descriptive names. As with the Tea Party, such names had nothing to do with the efforts associated with the mayfly groups.

In New York, the names of the parties have been quite entertaining up until recently when more pedestrian monickers have taken over, such as Liberal, Conservative, Working Families, and Right To Life. Zzzzzz.

Back in the day, as they say, party names such as Locofoco were the vogue. Locofoco? The Locofocos were a radical workingman's party in New York City in the 1830s whose slogan was "Bread, Meat, Rent, And Fuel! Their prices must come down!" Their actual name was the Equal Rights Party, and they attempted a kind of sit-in at the Democrats' Tammany Hall, upon which the main-streamer Democrats turned off the gas lights to clear the building. In turn, the radicals lit the newly-invented safety matches whose brand name was - Loco Foco. The Whig press in the city slapped the Locofoco label on them, which the splinter group eventually embraced.

The Soft Shells-Hard Shells - yes, as in crabs - denoted a rapprochement between two separate branches of the Democratic Party in New York. The Soft Shells were pro-slavery nationally in the 1850s and the Hard Shells anti. (New York State had abolished slavery in 1825.) Fernando wood won the city mayoralty in 1854 under the Soft Shell-Hard Shell banner, uniting the factions over local issues.

Wood, who had come to loggerheads with Tammany, won again in 1859, this time running on the Mozart Hall ticket, Mozart Hall being the rival clubhouse within the Democratic Party positioned against Tammany.

From the Civil War onward for about 60 years or so, the party name game slowed down. The Fusion Party, a nice musical, we-are-the-world party popped up, sure.

But nothing much happened until Fiorello LaGuardia, a hybrid Italian-Jewish Congessman, ran for re-election in 1937 on the City Fusion-Progressive-American Labor-Republican ticket. He ran against Jeremiah Mahoney who ran on the Democrat-Trades Union-Anti-Communist ticket.

In 1945, Newbold Morris, descended from the famous colonial Morrises and husband to the daughter of Judge Learned Hand, ran on the No Deal Party ticket and garnered almost one-quarter of the vote. And in 1950, Vincent Impelliteri won the mayor's office running for the Experience Party.

In 1961, Louis Lefkowitz lost while running on, among other party lines, the Non-Partisan ticket.

Perhaps the most entertaining and famous third party with New York roots is Teddy Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" party, really the Progressive Party. Sad to say, though, the over-the-top name was taken from T.R.'s running mate in 1912, California governor, Hiram Johnson who said, "I'm as strong as a bull moose!"

I have a letter in to the Tea Party leaders suggesting that, in New York State anyway, they strongly consider changing their name to the Crackpot Party. Truth in advertising, my friends. Truth in advertising.

Monday, September 27, 2010

There is a fearful symmetry when one compares the Bush presidency with the Obama presidency, regardless of where on the political spectrum you place yourself.

Bush first came into office amidst acrimony over Florida's hanging chads and the recounts. He and his coterie of right wing advisers were soon handed an unsought but nevertheless welcomed political gift in the form of the 9/11 attacks. Taking a righteous first step in Afghanistan, Bush was, just a few years later so far off course courtesy of the invasion of Iraq that he could never recover. Falling prey to a combination of blind anger, some sort of oedipal hangover, and shoddy or invented intelligence, his administration went on a war spending spree that was compounded by exhilaratingly unfair tax cuts for the wealthy.

The result? Trillions of dollars in public debt that a healthy financial system would have had trouble digesting, and which, as we know, an overheated, corrupt system simply could not cope with.

The lingering image of George W. Bush will be his look of surprised consternation as things began crumbling around him in 2006. He looked like someone who had just had a wet towel snapped at him in the boys' locker room. Everyone, including himself, knew he was out of his depth.

Very few people have doubted Obama's innate intelligence, his mental toughness or his high level of education. Yet, the President is turning out to be one of the most curious cases in American political history.

He, too, felt the sting of acid tongues during his campaign and immediately after. The gift-wrapped political present he and the Democrats received was, of course, the Great Recession.

He also received another present, sort of a cherry bomb in the mailbox - that is, the virulent, racist antipathy of the everyday right wing and that of the radical, shadowy Tea Party backers and its rank and file.

That kind of vitriol certainly has been of no help in helping the country recover economically. The Republicans have insulted while Rome burns.

But Obama missed a number of golden moments in the first year of his administration, as well. Instead of creating a seemingly technical "package" of health care reform measures, more urgently he needed to sell it to the nation as a way for individuals and small businesses to save money, save money, save money and be safe from the predations of big health and pharma.

The altruism of the bill is clear to clear-thinking people. But altruism wasn't a big sell to the middle and upper middle classes as they watched their home equity and savings erode before their eyes, and as they suddenly become horrified at the prospects looking their children in the eye.

For a person who was almost too absorbed in image building in 2008, Obama became absurdly aloof from such concerns once he was sworn in.

Piled on that has been a perceived lack of focus, occasionally in policy choices, and almost always in presentation of some excellent legislation and its benefits. A whistle stop tour of 50 stimulus projects in 50 states would have been a good common touch. Maybe he should have ruled from the road one week a month to personally oversee the reconstruction efforts. That goes double for the oil calamity in the Gulf.

In the cowardly new world of avalanches of web site info and solitary interaction with those data and images on a hyper-privatized screen, the political "consumer" was left on his and her own to make sense of what in god's name was happening. Imagine FDR only relying on fireside chats on radio to keep the American public's morale up in the 1930s.

Completely mystifying is what appears, to an average consumer of television news, a complete abandonment of the "youth market." While the President was on his tour of 50 projects in 50 states, he could have stopped at 50 college campuses to speak, not about our current travails, but about education and tomorrow's leaders and the Future as an American idea, which is sunnier than anyone can imagine right now.

18 to 23 year-olds would not have hammered him on his birth certificate, his faith, his family vacation choices. They would have been thirsty to have heard news about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Youth is innately narcissistic - tell them about their coming days. If nothing else, he could have shown a hearty thanks to one of the constituencies that put him in the White House.

Bush came to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with little political capital and when he accidentally found the entire world behind him ready to seek a multinational way to eradicate terrorism, he reverted to 19th century jingoism and go-it-alone policies that have killed hundreds of thousands and cost a trillion dollars. It's jaw dropping how much Bush and his cronies squandered.

Obama, who came into the White House with the whole country and most of the world ready to follow us into recovery, has stumbled not so much in a material way, but in what, in the final analysis, counts the most: leadership. He has squandered time and his substantial personal appeal as he has failed to take on the right wing in a consistently tough way. (Where's Joe Biden when you need him?)

Perhaps we are in a new country, like Alice Through The Looking Glass. We find ourselves, thanks to almost ten years of mis-management and wasted money and spirit, Americans in Squanderland.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Leave it to the morally and intellectually bankrupt Republicans to come up with a plan that proposes our country take a number of giant leaps backward. Meanwhile, they assert with a straight face that these proposals show they are not The Party of No. Interesting concept... NOT The Party of NO.

The first thing that these inhumane monsters on the right want to do is say NO to, to repeal, or at least hamstring health care reform enough so it limps along accomplishing nothing. So, people with pre-existing conditions, poorer children, marginal wage-earners, the almost-old and a host of others will find themselves tossed off the gurney and into the unknown.

The second thing the radicals want to do is to say NO to spending the rest of the stimulus package. This at the very time when the funds yet to be spent will be pumped into infrastructure, education, and towards mitigating the housing crisis.

The radicals are also saying NO to Social Security and Medicare at a time when millions and millions of Baby Boomers are reaching age 65. In the jolly spirit of their Know-Nothingism, though, Republicans have not made clear the specifics of how cuts would be carried out.

They also are saying NO to federal funding of abortions. NO to non-traditional marriage. NO to the rescission of the odious "Don't ask don't tell" policy in our armed forces. NO to a pathway to citizenship for aliens who serve in the armed forces. NO to a tax rise for the rich who are the only group to have achieved any personal economic growth in the last 15 years. NO to any legislation that the radicals believe is "unconstitutional," meaning anything they disagree with. NO to any sort of deficit spending, one of the pillars of modern state-interventionist economics.

What is absent from the New And Unimproved Contract On America?

Any mention of education funding whether for Head Start, English-As-A-Second-Language Programs, Anti-Drop-Out funding, or higher education funding. In other words, NO.

A mention, even in passing, of a coherent energy policy. Not even one that is pro-oil, which we might understandably expect. So, NO again.

Some sort of viewpoint on the continuing degradation of the environment? NO.

Proposals on how to deal with our increasingly at-risk food supply? NO.

Thoughts on how to deal with the continuing off-shoring of American jobs? NO.

Cutting out-of-control defense spending? NO.

The impulse to blame government for every ill in society is a strong one, and it occurs in equal measure on the left and right.

The chief difference is that the left generally believes in the perfectability of government, really an optimistic position that is about our own personal perfectability, and one that reflects the positive or "YES" nature of leftist politics through the centuries.

The right simply wants to burn the social contract and scatter its ashes, believing deep down that government per se is evil, that the individual is all that matters, that the accumulation of personal wealth at the expense of the commonweal is the preferable condition of society. In spasms of atavism, they wish to return to an existence in the "state of nature" that Hobbes so famously described as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Let's see how they're doing.

Solitary - play each of us off against the other politically. Fear thy neighbor, especially if he or she has a different-color skin or religion. Check.

Nasty - prevent people of the same sex from choosing their marriage partners. Check.

Brutish - shouting down opponents at town hall meetings, toting guns to political rallies, portraying a President as a (take your pick) monkey, a dictator, a terrorist. Don't exactly wear a Brown Shirt, but, you know, like, um, act like you're a Brown Shirt. Check.

Short - those without health insurance die almost 6 years earlier than those with it. Check..

Friday, September 17, 2010

Anyone who came of age in the 1960s remembers, if not from direct reading than from media coverage and informal discussion, Michael Harrington's landmark work on poverty, The Other America.

In painstaking detail, Harrington detailed the effects of race, ethnicity, gender, education, vocation and geography upon the material well-being of 1/3rd of our population. There were, and are, two Americas.

As Barron Laycock said in a reconsideration and review of The Other America earlier this decade:It is a sad truth that Harrington's book is as timely and as shocking today as it was some forty years ago. His account of the fate of millions of impoverished people of color and ethnicity remains as cogent and as relevant as it was then. Despite the long and tortured history of the social legislation that attempted to rework this problem in the decades since, the reality of the situation seems to be that nothing much has changed in terms of the life-chances and hopes of the members of the underclass.

The government announced yesterday that there are 44 million people living below the poverty line. Although the census data from which that number was drawn has yet to tease out the rest of the story, one can be reasonably certain that there is an equal number of people living in the next tier up from abject poverty. Further, we can add in the individuals and families who are struggling from the effects of the Great Recession and who, while perhaps not definitionally poverty-stricken, have found themselves staring into an abyss heretofore only populated by men, women and children very different from themselves.

So we can safely say that 100 million people in the United States live in poverty or are so close that for all intents and purposes they live in a psychological impoverishment that intensively affects their quality of life.

That's 1/3rd of our population, 40 million of whom are children under 18, few of whom will ever escape the poverty cycle if past history is any sign post.

The entire shadow hoard of poor, near poor and the poor-in-waiting is the bitter fruit of not only slavery, ethnic hate, and sexism, but today is also the product of the most despicably disingenuous government policies that favor the wealthy to an obscene extent.

Even more crazily, the most hopeless of the poor live but a few minutes or miles from the insatiable rich, like serfs prostrate at the gates of the barons' castles.

A perfect illustration of the two Americas exists in Fairfield County, Connecticut, a mostly suburban county outside New York City. Its largest city is Bridgeport.

Twenty-one per cent of Bridgeport's population lives below the poverty line; another 41% live in the next level just above the poverty line. Sixty-two per cent of a city of roughly 135,000 souls - or 84,000 - people live in poverty. Meanwhile in the town of Fairfield, 4 miles away from Bridgeport meaured downtown to downtown, a mere 4% of the population hovers in the two zones below or just above the poverty line.

In 2006 Fairfield was ranked as the ninth best place to live in America, and the second safest by Money Magazine. Its murder rate is less than one per year.

On the other hand, Bridgeport's violent crime rate is 1.6 times the national average.

"Coincidentally," Bridgeport is 30% African-American and 33% Hispanic while Fairfield town is more than 95% white.

Now the struggle rages in Congress about whether to allow the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy to expire.

The argument for keeping those cuts in place is that those earning over $200,000 create jobs with the money that otherwise would be going to taxes. In Bridgeport proper, the unemployment rate is 19%. The percentage of people who have never worked (and thus are unaccounted for in such statistics) is 12%.

The Bush tax cuts have been in effect for the better part of 10 years. So much for the job creation theory.

To circle back to Michael Harrington and The Other America: deepening the travesty is the virtual blackout imposed upon this story by the (dreaded) mainstream media.

Where are the special segments, the documentaries, the 5 part articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, etc.?

The frivolous media - right and left leaning - collectively turns its head. Instead, they luxuriate inside their silly echo chamber whose compass points are The Beltway, Wall Street, angry white America, and Lindsay Lohan (or other suitably fashionable proxy). Unjust, immoral and irresponsible. The Fourth Estate not only doesn't mitigate the problem, but helps perpetuate it by turning the blind eye.

Thomas Carlyle wrote in his Heroes and Hero Worship in History (1841) that Edmund Burke once said:

"...There were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important far than they all."

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens...
- T.S Eliot (The Wasteland)

About two weeks ago a mutton-chopped nobody claiming to be a pastor - a perversion of the word and an abomination to all good people of the cloth - announced the now infamous Koran burning.

Never mind that the promised bonfires evoked the eternally painful Nazi book burnings of the 30s and 40s. Never mind that Brecht, Hemingway, Gide, Freud, Gorki, Kafka, Einstein, Helen Keller, Proust and a host of other cultural standard-bearers' works were burnt in town squares and in country fields all over Germany and the rest of the Reich. Never mind that many, probably most, of us have fathers or grandfathers who fought, were wounded and died in the war to stop such savage acts. Never mind we Americans are a people who pose and perch on the high diving board of tolerance and freedom.

All Islam is the enemy, said "Pastor" Terry Jones. All Islam is represented by the acts of a few hundred terrorists - so much so that an Islamic community center near Ground Zero faces bitter opposition.

So what happened just the other day? The State Department announced that the sale of $60 billion in advanced weaponry to Saudi Arabia was approved.

Where is the caterwauling by Pastor Mutton Chops now? Where is the righteous indignation of the aggrieved families of the 9/11 victims? Where is the outpouring from the right wing radicals who so roundly denounced the Islamic center and stood silent as tombstones in the face of the threatened Koran burning?

Just to be clear, the reason we are arming the Saudis is to serve as a counterweight to Iran's Islamo-fascist regime. Makes sense, right? Take one Islamic absolute monarchy and play it off against the demagogue, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his merry band of nuke-makers. (Of course we are, now that our former comrade-in-arms, Saddam Hussein, is a footnote in history, and Iraq is an unholy mess. Beef up the Saudis and let them do the dirty work.)

The other reason the deal is going through is that the arms industry here and abroad has been reeling during the recession and, well, we all know who has the big bucks to spend on weapons. And why - our addiction to oil.

So, not only is there the unbearable hypocrisy of the home front spitting on American Muslims as we sell arms to the epicenter of anti-Western Islamic fervor, but we also get the chance to support a regime that is backwards, repressive, maltreats women and gays, and squashes any and all opposition.

Crown Prince Abdullah has often defended Saudi Arabia's position on human rights, going as far as to say in front of a human rights conference at the United Nations that, "It is absurd to impose on an individual or a society rights that are alien to its beliefs or principles."

He sounds like the kind of guy out of whose hands I would keep most advanced weapons, let alone weapons that make his country one of the most modern military presences in the world.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

It's rare that we read anything radical in a mainstream newspaper anymore. Indeed, it is like seeing a pterodactyl perched on the local church steeple, so accustomed are we to reading the bland protests on the editorial pages of the New York Times or listening to the sweaty, drug-induced rages on FOX.

Radicalism from the left? A sighting:

Here is a link to a piece in the St. Louis Dispatch on September 3rd that hearkens back to the radicalism of the 1930s and other angry eras when the people who really make this country work last got riled up over economic issues.

There are echoes of another, long-ago America in the piece, one where the majority of people worked physically rather than at a desk. So, there is a bit of a disconnect between the exhausted worker at the metal speed press or on the railroad on one hand and the counter person at Wendy's or the "tech rep" on the other end of your call to your cell phone provider on the other hand.

But the spirit and the goals of labor today ought to be the same today.

Make no mistake, business is exploiting the latter today just as business exploited the industrial worker of the past. And the only way for those workers to get their just desserts is to organize themselves. (If you think that a disruption by labor in steel manufacturing had dire consequences 80 years ago, just imagine what a stoppage in wireless service today would do.)

Not only is labor not organized and not protesting, but their sinister nemeses - the Tea Partyers and the radical right wing marching in the name of some cryptic populist urge - are being financed by the very billionaires who want to further drive down wages and ruin the country. There is class warfare and those of us who are preparing to walk off the stage of our working life should not be leaving such a world to our children.

Workers of the new millennium, unite... you have nothing to lose because you've already lost most of it: your well-paying jobs, your homes, your dignity. What else would you like to turn over to your new masters?

Friday, September 3, 2010

As we've witnessed in the last two years plus, politics is one very dirty game. Depressingly dirtier than most of the games the rest of us play to earn our daily bread.

Barack Obama is one of the more elegant, almost regal Presidents we've ever had. His high style and rhetorical mastery begs on bended knee comparison with John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But, "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer."

The President has mysteriously become a leader more in the mold of a Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge, and to many eyes and ears, appears cold, aloof, slightly supercilious and often tone deaf. The wisp of shallowness that appeared during the presidential campaign is now a full blown smoking stack.

Where are the ringing speeches, the great aspirations, the appeals to hope over fear? Gone, as far as we can tell. What happened?

There is no other place to lay the blame but to a kind of moral cowardice.

It seems Obama doesn't really believe in the Progressive vision. Was embracing it merely an election strategy? Either government is a constructive, positive force in our common life or it's a bystander.

No other developed country (and very few developing or so-called emerging countries) argue over this point. For instance, France is rated by the World Health Organization as having the best health care system in the entire world. Japan and even Brazil rank above us in the quality of their national mass transit systems. Our real literacy rate, which one approached 99% is now hovering around 85%.

Obama seems to forget that there are tangible problems that need government intervention and financing regardless of what any of the dangerous right wing fanatics shout. While he should be nailing his own 95 Theses to the door of Congress, he appears content to fiddle and adjust and essentially cower. Remember - he is the most powerful single person in the world, and even if a Progressive agenda doesn't pass legislative muster, simply using the bully pulpit will serve as a countervailing force against the reactionaries.

Presidents like FDR, Ronald Reagan, and the sadly sidetracked Lyndon Johnson had strong beliefs in a core set of values. Whether you agreed with them or not, one can easily summarize the three president's major stands, and we admire them for their courage if not the ultimate effects their beliefs had upon us.

So, advisory number one to the President: "Define your core principles, your ultimate philosophies, and sell them. Hard and often."

Another side of the President that is lacking is quite a bit more concrete.

He seems to consider himself above the ribbon cutting, baby kissing, the complimenting of the mayor's wife's new hat, walking the streets with a state senator who feels her district is slipping backward, or showing appreciation for the small business owner's dedication to achievement and her/his family. God is in the details, Mr. President. As the pundits put it, he gets an F in "the stagecraft of the Presidency."

His bumbling, half-baked touch was most evident during the oil catastrophe in the Gulf. He could not have plugged the leak himself, but he could have sent Joe Biden or a couple of Rear Admirals to set up a permanent base camp in New Orleans in order to "show the flag."

There have been literally thousands of stimulus bill projects around the country, yet we seem not to sense the President's, and therefore the Democrats', stamp on them. Everything seems theoretical under Obama's leadership. It keeps smelling as if he doesn't believe in his own actions.

But it goes beyond that. One of the most important accomplishments of his 20-month tenure thus far is the winding down of the war in Iraq. It will save lives and save trainloads of money. Yet the initial announcement and his nationally-televised speech seemed lethargic, lacking ardor. We should be dancing in the streets and the President should have been leading the band music. But we saw a ghost of passionate, intense candidate Obama.

As Yeats wrote in "The Second Coming," The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

Second advisory to Mr. Obama, coming from the left, for now a still-friendly if disquieted quarter: "Learn how to get your hands dirty." You can't glide above it all for much longer without completely losing the gains of the last few years.